Yantrakaal

My article on what the future holds for Virtual Worlds or rather what Virtual Worlds hold for us in the future appears in the Economic Times today. You may read the full article here . There is one important prediction that I have made in this article, namely, "Today it is impossible to exist without an email-id in real life and who knows it may be the same with similar identities in the virtual worlds, which are on the horizon. " Let us see how far this holds true

My article on the what the future holds for Virtual Worlds or rather what what Virtual Worlds hold for us in the future has appeared in the Economic Times today ... Read the full article here .

The news that SecondLife will become opensource is a big step in the development of 3D Virtual Environments. Should it become a genuinely open platform then evolution of the resulting architecture could become very interesting .. Individual organisations maintain their own physical servers and these can be accessed through the TCP/IP protocol. Currently, on these servers, we run the same HTTP application server (the 'web server') .. and anyone anywhere in the world can connect to the HTTP application server through the HTTP client ( the 'browser') Similarly, going forward, organisations can run their own SL servers on their own hardware and and allow ( or disallow ) individuals to connect their SL clients .. and this 'visit' SIMs ( just as we visit websites today) On current HTTP application servers we run fancy stuff like java applets, Flash animations, RealAudio and YouTube style specific applications ... provided they comply with correct protocols a...

This is an account of a very personal quest for the Truth. There are many ways to reach the same goal and this particular effort seeks to reflect the Truth in the still waters of a dispassionate yet rational analysis. Sages and seers from time immemorial have held that the Truth is beyond reason, transcends the boundary of the physical world and can only be perceived at an intuitive level. This humble exercise is an attempt to see things from a slightly different perspective. a rational approach, based on physical phenomena, may have many limitations but the desire to abandon it is an act of intellectual laziness. While it is true that many mystics have perceived the truth intuitively, it may be more satisfying to take the intuitive approach as a matter of choice and not of necessity. This analysis begins with the principles of Advaita Vedanta and maps them against known facts from the world of science. Unlike in the past we have neither tried to invoke Quantum Mechanics and oth...

The Deccan Herald has an article that features yours truly aka Calcutta Cyclone. Though the article is rather sceptical about SL calling it a fool's paradise, the fact remains that this is how new technologies are initially viewed. But we know that Satyameva Jayate, Truth shall Triumph, even though truth is portrayed in an illusion. The original page is no more available but you can see a cached version of the page here. Given the confusion with transient links ... here is a 'permanent' image of the article.

An article on SecondLife in the Deccan Herald features your truly, that is Calcutta Cyclone . The original page is no more available but a cached version of the page can be viewed here .

The disastrous performance of the Indian Cricket team in the World Cup will no doubt spawn an outpouring of unimplementable solutions like "change the coach / captain", "get fresh players" etc .. however all these and other respectable solutions are useless because the people who are entrusted to implement any of these are all (a) corrupt and (b) incompetent and there is no hope of anyone who is not corrupt or not incompetent to find a place in the cricket administration . Hence I would like to propose a solution that is absolutely person independent .. Let us create a catalog of all possible first class cricketers in India. Let us define a metric against which the performance of any cricketer can be measured. This could be in terms of runs scored, balls faced, number of 4s/6s, wickets taken, runs given away and so on. This metric should be moderated by certain weighting factors, like 'strength' of the opposition ( obviously, 50 runs scored against South Afr...